HOLLYWOOD — Run, don’t walk. That is the mantra for tonight’s 79th annual Academy Awards.
Organizers for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences want the winners to rush up to the stage and not to dawdle, chat, stroll or play kissy-face on their way to the podium. The point is to get the show moving more quickly than past years to minimize the boredom factor.
In living memory, the only person who ever made an entertaining spectacle out of a long trip to the stage is lovable Italian madman Roberto Benigni when he won the best actor Oscar for Life Is Beautiful (1997). The irrepressible Benigni scampered across the tops of other nominees seats while screaming out joyous babble.
This year, if Peter O’Toole for Venus scores an upset and grabs the best actor Oscar from Forest Whitaker, an exception will have to be made. The 74-year-old Irishman moves at glacial speed these days and should not be forced into a trot. Not that anyone can force the iconoclast to do anything he doesn’t want to do, anyway.
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FAST-TRACKING THANK-YOU’S: The winners have 45 seconds to clear their frazzled brains and blurt out their thank-you speeches before being hustled off stage. But the Academy, sympathetic to the needs of winners but eager for that fast-paced show, has implemented an instant on-line thank-you video stream.
Winners with more to say can talk as long as they want into the special camera setup backstage. The clips will be available on the oscars.com site for friends, family and anyone else who is interested in what is obviously the most tedious part of the Oscar show — unless you are one of the people whom a winner thanks by name.
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MODEST MAN: Canadian Ryan Gosling may have won the Independent Spirit Award as best actor for Half Helson yesterday, yet he is rooting for his rival Forest Whitaker to win the Oscar tonight for The Last King of Scotland, despite his own Oscar nomination for Half Nelson.
“I’ve got a lot of money riding on Forest,” Gosling told People magazine yesterday. “I know he’s going to pull through for me.”
Gosling, who was born in London, Ont., also revealed that he plans to take his mother and sister to tonight’s Academy Awards. But actress-girlfriend Rachel McAdams — who coincidentally and perhaps bizarrely was born in the same London hospital as Gosling — will be missing-in-action because of work commitments.
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LET THE SUNSHINE IN: Little Miss Sunshine won big at the Independent Spirit Awards yesterday, grabbing best picture, best screenplay (Michael Arndt) best director (the husband-and-wife team of Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris) and best supporting actor (72-year-old curmudgeon Alan Arkin).
That may not mean much in the Oscar race tonight, however. Little Miss Sunshine is thought to rank third behind The Departed and Babel in the best picture category. Arkin is running second to Eddy Murphy of Dreamgirls in the best supporting actor race while the best original screenplay Oscar is going to Peter Morgan for The Queen, according to predictions.
Dayton and Faris did not even get a nomination for best director in the Oscars. That makes Little Miss Sunshine the only best picture nominee that was not named in the best director category. Briton Paul Greengrass made it instead for directing United 93.
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GIRL POWER: Abigail Breslin, title star of Little Miss Sunshine, is one of four 10-year-old girls to be nominated for an Oscar in its 79 years. Only one has won, as best supporting actress. It is Tatum O’Neal for Paper Moon (1973). Breslin will turn 11 in April. That means O’Neal, a few months younger when she won, would still be the youngest Oscar winner ever in a competitive category even if Breslin took the support Oscar this year.
The other 10-year-old nominees, also in the support category, are Mary Badham for the civil rights classic To Kill A Mockingbird (1962) and Quinn Cummings for The Goodbye Girl (1977). That excludes Shirley Temple, only six years old when given a pint-sized honourary Oscar in 1935 in recognition of her astonishing lineup of hit movies of 1934.
Among other teenage winners, there is Canadian-born Anna Paquin, 14 when she got the best supporting actress Oscar for The Piano (1994), and Patty Duke, 16 when she won the same Academy Award for The Miracle Worker (1963).
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DIAMOND DEMONSTRATION: A few nominees and celebrity friends will be wearing small red tear-drop pins tonight. They include Leonardo DiCaprio and Djimon Housou, both nominated for Blood Diamond, and sympathizer Ryan Gosling, best actor nominee for Half Nelson.
The pins came from Amnesty International and are intended to support a campaign by Amnesty and Global Witness to draw attention to how the diamond trade funds civil wars in African nations. The pins will be auctioned off with proceeds to go to rehabbing child soldiers who are forced to fight in some of these heinous conflicts.
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FOODIES: Wolfgang Puck has gone mostly organic for tonight’s lavish post-Oscar spread at the Governors Ball, where stars go immediately after the Oscars before they fan out to the higher profile parties in West Hollywood, like Elton John’s fundraiser for his AIDS foundation or the Vaniety Fair bash in celebration of themselves.
Among the main buffet dishes is roasted organic “smart” chicken breast. Personally, if I ever met a smart chicken, I wouldn’t roast it and feed it to Hollywood celebrities. Other dishes include grilled Snake River Farms Kobe beef with bordelaise sauce, wasabi potato puree, risotto with black truffles dug up by pigs (we presume) in Perigord, France, spiny lobster Shanghai-style with crispy spinach, striped bass “en croute” with sauce choron and stir-fried Chino Farms organic vegetables.
The seafood station offers a selection of spiny lobster, jumbo prawns, king crab legs, Kumamoto oysters, farm-raised mussels and Littleneck clams. A tapas table goes gonzo, including an offering of potato gnocchi gratin with gorgonzola cheese. A sushi station will beckon with the usual fare. Trays will to be passed around with other delectables, including smoked salmon with French farm-raised osetra caviar. The dessert buffet includes Valrhona organic chocolate fudge. Yummy.
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GORED: Much fuss has been made about the prospects of an Oscar for environmentalist and former U.S. presidential candidate Al Gore in the best documentary feature catetory.
Let’s set the record straight. While Gore is the only star and the heart of the picture, the Oscar would go to producer-director Davis Guggenheim, the guy who persuaded Gore to do the picture in the first place. Gore, however, will attend the Oscars, serve as a presenter and will likely go up on stage with Guggenheim and other producers of the doc if it wins. This is also thought to be potential fuel for Gore to change his mind and enter the 2008 presidential campaign.
Meanwhile, singer-songwriter Melissa Etheridge is thought to have a good chance to win for best original song. She wrote I Need to Wake Up for An Inconvenient Truth, and that (I believe) would be a first for Oscar — that a documentary generated the best song Academy Award.
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MONEY, MONEY, MONEY: Advertisers ranging from banks to car companies have set a record for splurging on Oscar ads. A 30-second spot now costs $1.7 million, up from $1.6 million last year and double what it cost in 1997. This is true despite declining ratings for the show, although it still ranks second only to the Super Bowl as a once-a-year ratings blockbuster in North America.
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences has strict rules for ads. For example, no host, nominee or presenter can be seen in one. So the American Express ads with Oscar host Ellen DeGeneres are forbidden.
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SWAG BAGS: Thanks to rulings by the IRS last summer that demanded income taxes be paid on awards show gifts, the Academy has discontinued its ridiculously extravagant collections of goodies to the nominees and presenters (companies fought to get their merchandise into these $100,000-plus swag bags for the publicity they could generate).
But the practice is still continuing in the periphery of the Oscars themselves. There are “gifting suites” springing up at locations designed to attract Oscar-bound celebs who are trolling for dresses, accessories, jewelry, spa treatments, hair and makeup help, etc. But some are actually charity related, making the bling less of a sting when tax returns are filed.
bruce.kirkland@sunmedia.ca
